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So long, and thanks for all the tweets! Twitter’s new API, and what it means for SlideDeck

All good things come to an end sometime, and unfortunately, the Twitter Content Source in SlideDeck 2 is no exception.Yesterday, Twitter finally retired version 1 of its API, which SlideDeck relies upon to enable you guys to pull your tweets into your sliders. This means that if you’re using the Twitter content source for any of your sliders, you’re likely staring at a blank space on your page right now, and are full of questions, the most common of which I’m going to attempt to answer below.

Why not just use the new version of the API?

We’d love to, but there are new restrictions associated with V1.1 of the API, including: the requirement to regularly re-connect your Twitter account to your SlideDecks, and strict formatting of tweets, giving us less flexibility to style your tweets’ appearance within your SlideDeck Lenses.

Both of these restrictions make Twitter pretty impractical for us to work with as a Content Source for SlideDeck, since they’d require you to manually babysit your Twitter sliders, and you’d have far less control over how they are visually presented on your site.

What alternatives do I have?

If you desperately need to embed your tweets into your website, the official Twitter widget is a decent option. We’re also currently searching for other viable plugins that will dovetail with SlideDeck, and will let you know as soon as we find any good candidates.

Will you ever bring Twitter support back to SlideDeck?

Well, it all depends - tell us in the comments how much you’d like us to explore re-integrating with Twitter in SlideDeck!

&lt;a href=”http://polldaddy.com/poll/7178707/”&gt;How would you feel if Twitter support never returned to SlideDeck?&lt;/a&gt;

Jason

Hey Peter. No news from us, I’m afraid – Twitter’s forging ahead with their new API, so I don’t think we’ll be able to get this back into SlideDeck unless they make some significant changes to their current setup.

Julie

It would be so great if you could run your Twitter feed one tweet card at a time like you can Facebook. I hope you will consider adding that – this is such a robust plugin, it is definitely missing something that Twitter isn’t included in dynamic feed sources anymore, even though I understand it’s Twitter’s fault for restricting the API.

Jason

Yep, you’d think that’d be an option, but unfortunately Twitter is trying to exert a lot more control over the presentation of its content. Not to worry, should this change in the future, we’ll be all over it!

Raphael Love

Slidedeck = Awesome Slidedeck + Twitter = Awesomer Slidedeck without twitter makes for lots of sad Tweeple. It is my sincere hope that this is something that can be restored. I was looking forward to vine integration via the twitter API.

Leandri

Patti

Don’t sweat it! Much more important to have the custom slide capability and the other. I hate to say it, my IMO Twitter is shooting themselves in the foot by trying to control use. They need to consider their userbase before creating such a restrictive API!

Jason

Rebel Outlaw

I’m in the midst of reworking my websites, so already had a taste of the new twitter API, don’t care for it at all, but I do want to be able to display tweets with sliderdeck, on my pages and the pages of my customers. So personally I hope there is a good solution to overcome this. I’ve been testing slidedeck lite, deciding if this is something I want to upgrade to developer. I hope even more sources are on the horizon for slidedeck.

Jason

Based on some quick testing I did, you can embed the official Twitter search widget in Custom HTML slides (see screenshot – http://goo.gl/mbtf3), but as for dynamically pulling individual tweets, it’s currently not looking good. We’ll keep an eye on subsequent iterations of the Twitter API!

Jason

Thanks for the suggestion! Yeah, we considered adding Tumblr support for SlideDeck a while back – the thing about it is that it’s more of a content aggregator, so content can come in in all shapes and sizes, so we figured why not go straight to the source first?

Clay Asbury

Jason

It does impose a lot more restrictions than before, yeah. Sure, Twitter wants more control over how content from the platform is represented, but it does limit the options available to developers who want to build on top of it.

Jason

Hey Scott – yep, it’s a great idea, and one avenue we considered. Based on how vocal everyone is about using Twitter in general, we’ll determine whether there’s enough of a need to build in this kind of integration.